Nana Olomu

Nana Olomu was born around 1852 in Jakpa, in the Itsekiri kingdom of the western Niger Delta (in what is now Delta State, Nigeria). He was the son of Olomu Numatsi, the principal Itsekiri merchant of the mid-nineteenth-century palm-oil trade.

He inherited his father's commercial position in 1883 and built across the next decade the most extensive trading operation of the Itsekiri coast. He established a private army of approximately three thousand soldiers, a fleet of approximately one hundred and fifty war canoes, and trading factories along the Benin River, the Forcados River, and the Warri estuary. He maintained direct commercial relationships with the Liverpool and Hamburg palm-oil houses, conducted diplomatic correspondence with the British Foreign Office, and was formally recognized in 1884 by the British Consul Edward Hewett as Governor of the Benin River — a colonial-era title that acknowledged his de facto authority over the river commerce.

His refusal to accept British intermediation of his palm-oil trade — analogous to King Jaja of Opobo's refusal seven years earlier (also placed in this archive) — produced the diplomatic crisis of the early 1890s. The British Consul Ralph Moor took military action against him in August 1894. The Itsekiri-British Naval War of August-September 1894 saw the British naval expedition reduce Nana's principal residence at Ebrohimi after seventeen days of bombardment. Nana surrendered, was tried at Old Calabar, and was exiled to the Gold Coast.

He was permitted to return to Itsekiri territory in 1906 — twelve years after his exile — but stripped of his Governorship and forbidden to participate in commerce. He lived the remaining decade of his life as a private citizen in Koko.

He died on the third of July 1916, age approximately sixty-four.

He is honored here as the Itsekiri merchant prince whose refusal of British intermediation cost him his Niger Delta empire.